Thirteenth World Conference

The Lives to Come

Mauro Ferrari

The Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston comprises over 1,200 employees and credentialed physicians, and 700+ clinical trials. TMHRI is a leader in translational medicine and emphasizes innovative approaches such as Nanomedicine, tissue regeneration, and system medicine, within the context of one of the leading hospital systems in the Nation. In Dr Ferrari’s tenure President and CEO, TMHRI has more than doubled its research grant portfolio, nearing top- 10 status in the USA among hospital-based research institutions, and recruiting 5 members of the National Academies and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Ferrari’s degrees are in mathematics (Padova), and mechanical engineering (PhD, Berkeley California). He attended medical school at The Ohio State University. He served as tenured professor in engineering at Berkeley, Ohio State, and the University of Texas, and of internal medicine at Ohio State, The University of Texas, the
M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, and currently at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. He directed the formulation and launch of the National Cancer Institute’s program in cancer Nanomedicine, which has been active since 2005 and remain by far the largest such program in the world. Dr. Ferrari continues to lead his laboratory at TMHRI, dedicated largely to cancer Nanomedicine and transport oncophysics. He has published more than 220 archival papers, 6 books, and over 50 patents. He has received many national and international honors.

Nanotechnologies are of great interest in the context of the drive toward individualized oncology, and may prove to be the necessary catalyst for its large-scale implementation. In this talk I will present nanoporous-silicon-based approaches for the individualization of medical intervention: multistage vectors for the preferential localization of therapeutic agents; therapeutic monitoring nanotextured chips for the proteomic and peptidomic content profiling of biological samples; nanochannel delivery systems for intelligent time-release from implants, and bionanoscaffolds for tissue regeneration. While novel nanoplatforms engender direct clinical applications, at the same time they afford the formulation of novel frameworks and hypotheses for the basic understanding of pathological processes. In particular, multistage particulates are the probes that afford the exploration of a new perspective of cancer, that is, that the unifying aspect of the canonical ‘hallmarks of cancers’ all relate to dys-regulation of mass transport at scales including the molecular, cellular, microenvironmental, and systemic. These considerations are the starting point for “Transport OncoPhysics”.